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REPLACING THE WINDOW ON YOUR PC
Windows 98 can be reinstalled right over the top of the existing windows installation, without impacting your present applications. Boot the original Windows CD and just reinstall. There is also a system file checker (SFC.exe) which can check for munged Windows components and reinstall them, if you are still running Windows.
This might not always fix all the problems you are having, because the registry is not recreated in this technique, the original Win98 registry is re-merged with your present registry. So it is best to perform registry cleanup first along with spyware removal, and virus removal.
On most PCs these days, there is a "system restore" disk. Plop this CD into your CDROM and read the instructions. Many times there are options on what to do, such as reinstall Windows, wipe disk and reinstall Windows, reinstall drivers, or install Manufacturer software that came with the PC. Some early versions of Dells seem to be a notable exception, however, as they have an actual Win XP disk that you use to restore XP ONLY. There aren't even any extra drivers on this XP. See this for info on reinstalling a recent Dell. See this page for installing a new disk drive.
PCWorld recently had an article on several different ways to do a Windows reinstall. They talk about a "repair (or "refresh") reinstall, and a "complete reinstall." These are the two options inside the Repair option. This can be a very complicated procedure, depending on how your PC is setup and the original media that came with the PC.
What you really need to do is capture "snapshots" of your PC and all its applications, called an "image" at appropriate points in time, and save it as an image. This is discussed in this section.
Check out this site, which has the screen shots for most of the Windows reinstallation steps.
Here is a Microsoft article on the (re)install/repair option in XP. Here is a Fred Langa article on the same thing.
WARNING!! EARLY 2005: Microsoft has removed the automatic reactivation of OEM versions of Windows XP when you do a reinstall. Ugh!!! This is apparently because too many people were figuring out how to steal the OEM keys, or some other reason. See this for example. There is a little trick you should use to save your key before you reinstall to bypass this pain. It involves saving a single file "wpa.dbl" and reinserting it after a reinstall.